Heartbeat of the Sun

Give your ears a taste:

This is an instrumental track on the Mickey Hart Band album "Mysterium Tremendum." In at least one live performance it had spoken words (listed in setlists as Morning Of The World):

The heartbeat of the sun

Strumming the backbone of dark becoming

Fear of eternity

Teams of light

The universe expanding out, out, out

Into dark matter of undifferentiated night

Nothing can undo our ultimate endings

But the purity, the purity of our beginnings

Who walked hand in hand with the sun

Among the sands of ancient Amah

The dance concludes where the dance began

Man and the universe, hand in hand

Fall, fall into [sinken]

Fall into a river

The love of entreatment

The first God-given

The dance resumes where the dance began

Man and the universe, hand in hand

Sounds of the Universe

Heartbeat of the Sun’s climbing percussive lines are based graphs of sunquakes. The sun is constantly vibrating because of the thermonuclear reactions taking place within it, which boil up to the surface. The flaming gas ball is akin to a giant round gong, with the boiling within striking its surface like many grains of sand inside a shaking globe. These tiny strikes from within cause the surface to vibrate, with pressure nodes appearing that describe its resonances. About ten million different vibrational patterns have been observed by helioseismologists (the people who study sunquakes). Some nodes are horizontal along the surface, like latitude lines on a globe. Others are vertical, like longitudinal lines. And others are interior, appearing between the center and the surface.

The l-nu diagram abstracts and consolidates these many nodes on a chart that is like a sonogram. The numbers along the bottom are the number of horizontal latitude nodes (0-350). Each of these nodes can support multiple frequencies. The number of frequencies supported for each node can be seen along the left edge. The intensity of each frequency can be seen in the color plotted. The graph shows a series of arcing lines. These lines were translated into a percussive pitch, which then ascended in a manner akin to the shape of these arcs. We listen “upwards,” starting with the lowest line and moving up.

"The hours spent with Fred were pure nourishment to me. Wherever we were—whether it was in Paris, London, or the Library of Congress—he had this great rhythm. I couldn’t imagine Fred on the dance floor, but with a book in his hand, he was Nureyev."This site is dedicated to my dear friend and colleague Fredric Lieberman. The man with the well stretched ear.